Load Our Last Save: Load Our Last Souls: Part 10

Thanks guys it has been great fun watching. In honor I have changed my ringtone to Black Knight 2000.

I do not agree with Ian, NG+ in dark souls is a cake walk. i struggled on my first play through and i took me 60-70 hours. NG+ took me about 10 hours, probably died less than 30 times.

It's amazing what one good run of the Souls games does to compact your playtime. I love that first 50-60 hour run, not knowing what's up ahead and then when you've finally finished all the content each successive run takes a fraction of that time.

This was fantastic. I think that Dark Souls 2 should feature a save import that would have the last boss be your character.

YES!!!! Pitty I missed it live, but it couldn't be helped.

I can't believe its over :( I'm really going to miss this content... :D still great to watch :D fantastic content

THAT was the fucking end boss? Was expecting a good old twelve-stage JRPG beatdown D:

@development: I did Gwyn with the full Havel too, it was one of the easiest bosses in the game.

Well done Vinny!

I think it is the easiest, by far. It's just the fact that his attacks are mianly magical, and are easily dodged with fast gear, as well as needing to constantly move forward to catch up with him, then use up even more stamina to attack him.

Also, I made that comment before watching, to be clear.

thanks vinny, rorie and ian for starting up this feature and sticking all the way to the end with it!

hope that a new feature pops up when dark souls 2 comes out :)

Oh thank god, I thought he finished it off on a round number. I was super pissed I missed it last night.

EDIT: Oh wait, did you miss it live too? Damn it.

@development: Well, all you do is run left and right, his attacks are still easy to dodge. I guess if you don't have enough stamina it could be a problem.

Thanks for the fast upload, my internet decided not to work when this was live. Good luck to Ian in his future endeavors. Hopefully you guys reunite for a Dark Souls 2 Endurance Run!!!

I faced Gwyn with light armor and next to no poise. Took me FOREVER. Havel rules, I guess.

Just parry!

Did Vinny ever did the painting boss?

My original comment was about Gwyndolin. I don't even know what's going on!

@development: Pinwheel is the easiest boss in the game.

@chrisbob: I appreciate the 'vague' storytelling, I suppose, but it also seems weird that this game has no sense of direction or story. Like, in Vinny's entire time playing the game, no NPC ever really told him where to go or what to do, so how does Mindcavitus even know what she's doing? It's just a shame that there's such an apparently rich backstory that never finds its way into the game proper.

This is/was a fantastic feture, and really helped kindle my Dark Souls interest again. That makes me happy, a little Dark Souls in my life is good for me.

@the_nubster: I heard somewhere that it was a play on how the original Zelda felt. I mean, did Link even know what he was doing? because nobody really talked to him, he was just going from dungeon to dungeon collecting magical junk and killing monsters. Zelda at the time had nothing to tell you the story or direction except for manuals, game magazines or talking to your friends that played it before.

I like a well told story, but the weird approach to narrative and direction this game has is part of what makes it feel so special.

This was great! This series alone made me buy Dark Souls on the PC and play it all the way through for a second time.

Really sad this is over. But it had a great ending.

All hail V-Bomb, the Dark Lord ...or Lady!

yes, this!

There are definitely NPCs that tell you where to go and what to do when you go through the critical path (although not in great detail). You get told to ring the bells and where they are, then told to get the Lordvessel and where it is, and then told to fill it with Lord Souls and I think told who possess them. But I'm guessing it's tough to keep the brief conversations from a few key NPCs in mind when playing the game over a year. But if you're playing the game without help, you really need to play close attention to the few NPCs you encounter since that's the only guidance you'll get.

I definitely agree the game doesn't have great pointers or reminders of what's going on or what you're supposed to be doing, and the backstory is mostly hidden. Just from the opening cutscene and the chats you'll mostly just think you have to go places, kill these things, and maybe they're bad? I think that's probably a deliberate choice to make it a largely open, unguided experience, but some of the broader story and backstory could be better raised.

@development: Haha, I forgot the last boss was named Gwyn. That's what we get for shortening names!

And I dunno, for Gwyn I had saved Solaire so we just kinda whaled on him. Dark Souls is easy as hell ever since it got patched. And, sure, Pinwheel is the easiest boss, but he's also barely even a boss to begin with.

I unpatched my PS3 version awhile back and, yeah, it was definitely harder. On top of super low drop-rates, reduced warp bonfires, and lots of crafting items not being available for sale (or being relegated to a single merchant), the enemy behavior was much different in places, most notably Lost Izalith (it was actually hard!). I was never big on Pyromancy, so the OP-ness of it didn't affect me, but I'm aware of it.

@development: Yup, I played Dark Souls at launch and hated it because it seemed the devs got way too up their own ass about Demon's undeserved "IT'S SO HARD" hype, at the expense of good game design. I quit around Sen's Fortress.

I played it recently on PC all the way through, and after that patch, along with better framerates, found it to be hilariously easy, beating most bosses in one try. I was actually inspired to play it because of this series, and seeing Vin succeed despite being obviously bad at the game. I just figured he did some weird farming or something to pump his stats, but nope! That patch doubled the amount of souls you get, and massively increased drops of Humanity, for Hot Kindling Action. I think that alone would have been enough, but it also clearly reduced aggro range and other stuff.

@sebmal: That's brilliant.

Thanks guys for coming back to Dark Souls! It is always great to see my favorite game being played especially by you guys since it was hilarious.

Eighty eight hours? o_o

@deathpooky: I believe the story will be a bit more explicit in Dark Souls 2. Because the DLC has it's story bit pretty much spoken by the NPCs.

Personally I had a great time going from video to video in YouTube and reading articles about the lore -- it's really fascinating, IMO. But maybe having more of a traditional narrative could fish more people in being interested in reading further into the story.

sad its over...another must-watch feature on Giant Bomb

If Mindcavitus isn't the final boss of Dark Souls 2 I will refuse to expect it as canon.

It would be really great if From Software did like SirTech did with Wizardry IV, and just collect the character names of a lot of users who chose that ending, and randomly select one of them as the end boss when a new Dark Souls II character is created.

@chrisbob: Yeah, pretty much all of the major bosses were good characters, or at least heroes/gods of the age of fire and the original battle with the dragons, but they all have gone insane or become corrupted in trying to maintain things. So regardless of your ending you either wipe out all of the powers of Lordran, either restarting the age of fire or making yourself the leader in a new age of darkness.

I mean, Lordran sucks and has fallen apart, and the fire has created this whole undead/hollow situation, but there's at least the implication that there are other lands out there still doing their thing. Though if you believe Kaathe, then the age of fire is just Gwyn and his people holding onto power, while the age of dark is supposed to be the new age of man.

God damn I loved this series and Im kinda sad that its now over. It got me to finally start the game myself and also finish it (Jeff Greens amazing stream was also an inspiration..)

Hope we get some Dark Souls 2 goodness sometime after DS2 comes out ! Cant wait for us all Dark Soul fans to experience a brand new adventure !

I don't think I have ever heard someone who is so consistently wrong in giving advice as Ian. He's right maybe 10-15% of the time yet he has no awareness of this.

The hallway fight is giving me SUPERHOT vibes.

@hassun:

Yea... Gwyn's nowhere near this easy

A lot of people, including myself, run AC4 at high settings with great fps. Just because you can't get it to work, don't keep saying AC4 on the PC isn't "optimized" or coded well. FFS Rorie

Yeah, I missed it live. It was still pretty great though. I'm sure the chat lost their shit when Vinny started killing Npc's. I thought it was hilarious.

Praise the sun!

Great series guys, really enjoyed watching Dark Souls with you guys instead of playing it! :)

@rorie Don't know what to say man, AC4 on PC runs great for me, seems optimized really well actually. If you also can't get a controller working for FF8 maybe something else is up with your machine?

Any game that results in everyone recommending a third-party program to me to unlock merely acceptable performance is a bad port. And I'm hardly the only one pointing out that it's a crappy port.

http://www.dsogaming.com/pc-performance-analyses/assassins-creed-iv-black-flag-pc-performance-analysis/

http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=31285490#item_31285490

Hell, even the GeForce guide itself doesn't max everything out on a Titan and still says to expect around 40fps:

http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/assassins-creed-iv-black-flag-graphics-and-performance-guide

Glad you're happy with 30 fps from your PC gaming rig, though, I guess.

Well that was a really enjoyable series to watch and I do hope there's more series just like that from Giant Bomb.

There is no doing it wrong. If it worked, you did it right.

Yea I for sure had to tweak it a bit, Vsync through the Nvidia control panel (half refresh rate) fixed all my FPS issues with AC4 but besides that game runs great.

This was an incredible series. Thanks guys.

@professork: Well that's a joke of course but yeah, Pinwheel is ludicrously weak.